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The September quiz is here:
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=23661
Answering them one by one, #1 is in Gilman's M&B03, #2 is in Betza's Worse Than Worthless, #4 is in Leno's Gridlock Chapter 5. Question #3 for who called whom ''dead ringer for that enduring enigma'' is here. The seven basic chess pieces are representative of the visible system: Sun Falcon, Moon Pawns, Mars Knight, Mercury Bishop, Jupiter King, Venus Queen, Saturn Rook. So in poem 7 here Venus calls King Jupiter, who just spoke, ''dead ringer...'' in her six lines.

Was Omar Khayyam pre-Islamic? No, but as genuine mathematician he was able to think outside the box. The 7th Pleiad, taken to be Electra(F) rather than Merope(P) by the next morality CMVIII, was more visible in antiquity. Conventional wisdom is that you used to count seven unaided about the same brightness, and telescopes now show many stars there in frequently eastern sky. Classically, seven specific similar-brightness stars were the Pleiades in Taurus chased by Orion. Even to Byron 200 years ago writing, ''Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below'' emphasizing six and a seventh. Take a look because the actual hundreds of stars clustered in pleiades will disperse over 250 million years. As representative of change, it is like the North Star's changing over time from Thuban 3000 BCE to Polaris today; and sometimes it is Vega too over 26,000-year precession cycle.